Cook the Best Eggs: Poached

1. Introduction: What to Expect From This Class: You are about to cook the best poached eggs. If you're here, you're trying to accomplish one of the most sensitive cooking techniques in the history of cooking and that is only a slight exaggeration. This course experiments with popular techniques and explores when and why they may or may not work and you'll decide which one works for you. But we don't just cook eggs in water here. We'll also cover some of the most classic egg dishes where eggs are softly cooked or covered in sauces and spices and even wines. I'm also including eggs en cocotte in this class, because the end result is the same even though technically poached eggs means the eggs are cooked directly in the water. You don't have to finish the entire course to start experimenting with poached eggs and you don't have to consume the class in a specific order either. Also, I cut some corners and I make suggestions for making some recipes more approachable so you're more likely to actually cook them. I am actively around so you can ask questions, make suggestions and observations, and just otherwise engage over this weird shared obsession with eggs. To get the most out of this class, it's helpful to have some cooking experience. But only just to know how to change the heat level on your stove and to own a few pots and pans and utensils. The goal of this class is to give you the confidence to cook an egg in any liquid or sauce. So you can experiment with whatever you have on hand and always have a cheap, nutritious meal ready to go. My name is Jenna Edwards and I produce a cooking YouTube channel, Cooking Companion TV. I think everyone can enjoy cooking at home. My goal is to introduce you to new foods, flavors, and techniques, especially when it connects us across cultures. I'm not professionally trained so my teaching style is from one home cook to another. This is part of a larger series about cooking eggs. I eat everything I cook. It takes me some time to cook all of these recipes and not get tired of eating eggs. But I will regularly update this class with new recipes as I become aware of them so keep an eye out for that. With that, let's get right to it. 2. Project Introduction: Your project for this class is to poach some eggs. Go figure. You don't have to wait till you're finished with the class to start cooking. You don't have to consume the class in a particular order. I've arranged it in the most logical order to me, and I may mention a technique that's featured in another recipe, but you can skip around as you like. To get the most out of this skill, I recommend starting with a basic poached egg. Choose one of the techniques for getting smooth whites and try it. Try all of them. Get a feel for which pan you're most comfortable with. Do you like the vinegar addition? Because you happen to like the taste of vinegar. Do you not care about smooth whites at all? Then try something new. Rummage through your pantry, see what you can pull together with what you already have and go from there. I expect to see a lot of shakers because since you can throw literally anything in there, you just basically need can of tomatoes. Then upload a photo to the project discussion so we can see what you did and take note of how you made yours, any substitutions or additions you made and what you do differently next time. Now for some advice, expect to get it wrong at first. Even I can research recipes. I think it's a piece of cake. I'll get this on the first try and then mess it up, I have to try a couple of times to get it, and that's the purpose of the class project. It's one thing to know a recipe, it's another to build the actionable muscle memory for it. Hopefully, I've made the food looks so delicious that you can't wait to make every recipe, so jump in and start poaching. 3. Classic Poached Egg: Let's cover the three ways to poach an egg. Let's get down to business. We want fully cooked whites and runny yolks, or at least soft jammy yolks. Getting this delicate balance is the art of poaching an egg properly, along with the smooth egg whites without all those wispy flyaways. Here, I've plated them over some leftover cauliflower rice, because the leftovers are my favorite way to carry a perfectly poached egg. The first note for eliminating or producing the flyaways is to use fresh eggs as fresh as you can get them. Fresh eggs have tighter egg whites. When you crack an egg, you can see two textures of whites. The ones that stay close to the yolk and hold their shape, and the ones that run away. We see this most easily when we fry an egg. Well, this also matters when poaching. As an egg ages, the whites will loosen, so older eggs will have more looser whites and younger eggs will have more tighter whites. We have three techniques for taming the loose whites. Let me just point out that these techniques are strictly for aesthetic purposes. Loose whites are still perfectly edible. They may be a bit of a hassle and certainly aren't as pretty the plate as a solid shape, but they're still good. It doesn't mean the egg is bad, or spoiled. I'll start with my preference. Straining away the loose whites. Crack an egg into a fine mesh strainer or sieve, and let those loose whites drip into a glass or a bowl underneath the strainer. It only takes a minute or so to fully strain them off. What you have left is the whites that will hold their shape when cooked. Those are the tighter whites I'm talking about. Transfer the strained egg to a small bowl, or a ramekin to drop them into the water. Otherwise, you'll cook the egg into the strainer and it's more difficult to clean the strainer. When it's ready to come out you'll notice very few flyaways floating in the water. We have in nearly perfectly shaped white surrounding the yolk. For the next experiment, I'm going to use the same water since it's already hot. Another popular suggestion is the swirl method. No straining, just crack the egg into a bowl and when the water reaches temperature, you make a small vortex in the pot, or pan and drop the egg into the center of the vortex. The movement of the water should keep the whites from roaming around the pot and in theory, they'll cook together into one solid shape. Well, you can tell me what it looks like, but technically, the whites held together. They are still a few flyaways floating in the pot, but they aren't like those ghost in trails, they're floating off of the egg. Now I may keep experimenting with this one because it feels convenient to not have to strain the egg first, but it also only works for one egg at a time. If you're cooking more than one egg, you have to cook them separately, or use another method. The third popular suggestion is to add vinegar to the water. Now, some feel like it adds flavor to the eggs, which may not bother you if you'd like the flavor of vinegar and other say you need a fair amount of vinegar to affect the flavor and you don't need that much to tame the whites. I added just under a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar to the water, cracked my egg in a bowl, and slid the egg into the water. It worked and it didn't. The flyaways cook together, so that I could at least scoop them all out together with the egg, but they definitely tried to do their own thing. So I ended up with more egg to eat, but it's not nearly as pretty as the others. You do have to use a light colored vinegar for this, so no red wine, or sherry, or balsamic vinegar, just distilled white, or white wine, or even apple cider vinegar. You can see for yourself the pros and cons of each method. I'm sure there will be detailed circumstances that warrant the use of one technique over the others. But at least now you have a visual of how each technique works. Let's talk about the actual cooking directions that apply to all in any of these methods, you need a pot, or a skillet either one is fine, but it really depends on how many eggs you're going to cook at one time. The water should be 2-3 inches deep. If you look up the directions online, you'll find that the water temperature should be around 180-190 Fahrenheit, which is 82-88 degrees Celsius. Use a bowl, or a ram akin to slide the egg in rather than cracking it directly from the shell into the hot water. This helps keep the egg together so it cooks together more uniformly. If you've ever noticed how the whites behave when you crack open an egg, they like to drip, or simmer in their own time. We're trying to get everything to cook together. Don't crack it directly from the shell. The general consensus is to let the eggs cook for 3-4 minutes. I'm just going to use the same water here since it's already hot and I let this cook for four minutes. The yolk is overcooked truth be told, I wasn't timing it and I lost track of time, maybe three minutes would have been just right. These are my two eggs I cooked at the recommended water temperature. One was dropped in straight from the egg and cooked the swirl method. The other was strained and put in with a bowl, although it's overcooked, I'll demo my favorite way to snack on a poached egg. It's with super good olive oil, a little salt and pepper and then you to put up with some toasted bread. Now for my personal method of cooking based on more visual cues, because I remember that better than technical cues. I bring water to a boil and then reduce it to a simmer. How I remember it as the water should be just active enough to keep the egg from floating straight to the bottom, or I should say stinky straight to the bottom and just sitting there but not so active and bubbly that the egg gets tossed around like a plastic bag in the wind. Honestly it sinks to the bottom anyway because the egg immediately cools the water when you add it, but that's just how I remember the visual cue of what the water should look like. That almost always gets me pretty close to perfect. I use a spoon to gently flip my eggs as soon as they're in the water because I have had them cook to the bottom of the pan and then they break when I tried to remove them. I always very gently just try to flick it away from the bottom just a few times so the whites can start to set without attaching it to the bottom of the pan. Then I let it sit there for a little over a minute, but not quite two minutes. I just watch it dance around and I study the whites to see when they're looking opaque. It's not something to walk away from. Sometimes I gently lift it to check on the whites and if it's close but not quite ready, I turn off the heat and I let it sit in the hot water until I think the whites are ready. Like I said, this took just under two minutes to cook. The water is hotter than the technical directions, more around 200 degrees so the eggs cook more quickly, and that may produce a more firm egg white that way. In general, I'm okay with that because what I really want is that runny yolk. We've gone over three major recommendations for getting smooth egg whites. Straining, swirling, and adding vinegar. We've seen to cooking methods a technical approach and my visual approach. Now do a little test to see what's comfortable for you. It only works if it's something you can remember and can consistently replicate. Go poach some eggs. 4. Poaching Multiple Eggs, In Advance, & Reheating: Let's poach a whole bunch of eggs. This video was a lot of fun for me and I learned so much. Let's get to it. If you want to poach more than one egg, whether that's for guests or just a prep your meals for the week, you're somewhat limited in your options to get those smooth whites. Or are you? First I tried my preferred method of straining for eggs and I did it in a medium strainer, rather than watching one egg at a time drip out. Eggs won't mix together, they will stay separate, so this is fine, except the whites attached to the mesh and yokes pulled away when I went to separate them into ramekins. That was weird. We'll get back to that, I filled a skillet with water almost to the top, about one-and-a-half inches deep and I brought it to a simmer. Hindsight, I think the water could have been hotter and this is where you can see the yolks trying to wander away from there whites. Now, I'm trying a new method I read about on food52.com, where at this point you turn off the heat and cover the pan and let them sit for at least 10 minutes while they slowly cook. For some people, this is going to work out gloriously, for me it failed spectacularly. The whites are very soaky and I guess I could have turned the heat back on but I had already moved on to another technique that is much more intriguing. Right before I started filming this, I ran across another video by epicurious.com about poaching eggs and I decided to add it in. Let me just say how defeating it feels to think I've been super thorough with techniques and recipes for this class, only to find some new tidbit of information, nearly every time I'm on the Internet. There is that much information out there and we still cannot come up with a foolproof way for everyone to poach an egg perfectly. Bygones, I'll move on. This next technique is fairly close and it's science. We will take a one-to-one ratio of water and vinegar, distilled white is fine and what I'm using here and crack the eggs directly into the mixture. Here, I'm using one cup of water and one cup of vinegar. Let it sit for 10 minutes but no longer than 10 minutes and the acid will start to coagulate the proteins and the whites, keeping them together for the cooking process. The video I watched recommended swirling the ball every now and then to keep the vinegar distributed evenly around the eggs. Now, this is the first time I have ever heard anything like this but for the comments section of that YouTube video, it seems to be a very old technique that's been more of an oral tradition passed down rather than a common place culinary tradition and I find this stuff fascinating. After 10 minutes, you should see the eggs looking a little opaque and you can see the clearly defined lines of the eggs, this is so cool. Our water should be at a simmer again, more active than what you see here. I rushed in because my eggs had been in the vinegar mixture for over 10 minutes but you should have small bubbles coming to the top of the water and you should see steam. Also, this chefs suggested making the water 3-4 inches deep in a pot, and they cook for three minutes. I remove two of them at two minutes because I wanted to demonstrate how to reheat them later on. Part of that process means slightly under cooking them first, they get removed and covered in ice cold water to stop the cooking process. My remaining egg is the most perfect I've ever made and it's wild how the strainer isn't printing the pattern onto the whites. Now, let's inspect. The whites are cooked through and the yolk seems to still be molten and soft. Oddly, the bottom and the sides are a bit stiff, there's an edge. Let's cut it open. I mean, that is some gold right there. There's a tiny bit of watery white that came out, which means the whites hadn't fully cooked but they had mostly cooked. I'm going to take this one as a win. Let's check out one of the other eggs. It also has a stiff bottom and edge and I can see the whites look overcooked on the bottom, even though they only cooked for two minutes. So I suspect this is part of that vinegar coagulation. Maybe it's because I left them in a couple of minutes too long or I didn't stir the vinegar and water together enough. It's fine, I'm just being curious here at this point. Now that I've tried this a few times, here are my observations. First, the eggs don't absorb any vinegar flavor with this technique. Surprising. Second, start heating your water a few minutes before you soak the eggs. If your water isn't ready at the 10-minute mark, the eggs have nowhere to go and they have to stay in the vinegar mixture and that's, I think when you'll get that over coagulation. Third, try a little to remove the eggs from the vinegar solution, they are still raw eggs and can still run through the slots and a slotted spoon or strainer. Forth, this works with just one egg too. I tried it with one egg in a ramekin. I use two tablespoons of vinegar and two tablespoons of water. It is still difficult to remove the egg from the mixture so it can go into cooking water but you could just pour everything in the pot. There's nothing wrong with that. Fifth, try to use something with a flat bottom so the eggs can spread out a bit more than mine. You may not need as much water and vinegar that way either. Not only is this technique scientifically interesting, using an acid to cook fish for ceviche but you can use it for cooking multiple eggs at one time easily. At first, I thought the 10-minute wait was a bit of a hassle but you have to wait for the water to come to temperature anyway, so it really doesn't add time to the overall process. I cannot wait to hear what you guys think about this one. Briefly, when you want to reheat a pre poached egg, you have a couple of options. I like to bring water to a near boil or run the water from the faucet at its hottest setting, which of course, depends on your settings and cover the eggs in the hot water for a few minutes after they'd been removed from the cold water. This method is just hot enough to warm them up but not to cook them more than they should be. It took me 5-8 minutes or you can just keep trying to stick your finger in there to test the temperature. Another option is to bring water in a pan to a pre-simmer just when the water is moving around and there's steam but no bubbles and add in the eggs and let them sit there for a couple of minutes. It's that easy. Let's keep going and I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Eggs Benedict-ish & Eggs Florentine: Eggs Benedict-ish, and eggs Florentine, classic brunch dishes that are impressive mostly because of the sauce, and well, and it's a poached egg. The interest of keeping this approachable, I'm making some alterations to the classic recipe. Instead of a Hollandaise sauce, I'm demonstrating a Mornay sauce. Do you not know the difference? Good. That's the point most people don't. Also, there's more to do with leftover Mornay sauce than Hollandaise, so better all-round. The best strategy for all the moving parts here is to start with the bacon. Actually, this is another shortcut. I'm doing sliced deli here, but I'm also being gluttonous by pan-frying it in a tablespoon of butter, which was decadent and unnecessary but delicious. I use medium-high heat to get it brown in a few places, and I should have used a wider scale, and I do this all the time. I just didn't feel like the extra cleanup though. Once that's done, let's make the sauce. Melt two tablespoons of unsalted butter over medium heat and add one tablespoons of flour. I added two here, but if you want a thinner sauce, just do one. Two tablespoons, or even up to three tablespoons is great if you want a thick sauce to replace ricotta in lasagna, which is a delicious decision. Let this cook together for two minutes to turn golden, minus brown already, because I used the same pan I cooked the Hamon, and it's picking up some of those brown bits. That was deliberative me. Now we slowly pour in milk, or half-and-half. I'm using whole milk. You need fat for the sauce, so don't even try skimmed milk. We'll use two-and-a-half cups of milk. Bring it to a simmer, and keep whisking regularly for about 10 minutes so it can thicken. If you cook it too much and it over thickens, you can use more milk or water to thin it out. After 10 minutes, remove it from the heat and stir in one cup of grated Parmesan cheese. This should have been sifted. It's making my sauce lumpy. Also give it some seasoning, like a pinch of nutmeg and a pinch of cayenne, obviously salt and pepper, and for an extra bonus, lemon juice. That's right. Lemon juice and milk, ladies and gentlemen, it works, and it's delicious. Now, we can cook the eggs or reheat them as was the case for me. Let's stack our dish. I've toasted some bread, layered on my ham, got my beautiful egg, and we pour the sauce until we can't see any of it anymore. If you had chives or parsley, that would be lovely, but why wait? Let's see that egg. It is gorgeous and delicious. This is one that I precooked and reheated. For eggs Florentine, we'll use the same sauce. For two eggs, I'm using three ounces of frozen spinach that's been thawed. I need to squeeze out the extra water. Basically down to a quarter a cup of spinach. I've got half a tablespoon of ghee in the pan on medium heat to warm up the spinach. You can add in shallots, or garlic, or mushrooms, or whatever, to get you to like your spinach. But stir in about a quarter cup of the Mornay sauce, and heat it all up, and then cook or reheat your egg, and let's stack. Toasted bread, creamy spinach, perfect egg, and more Mornay. With all that extra Mornay sauce, you can use it in lasagna, or toast it with some pasta, or pour it over salmon or other vegetables like broccoli or roasted cabbage. It's good for a few days, so make the most of it while you have it. This is why I chose it over Hollandaise for this demonstration. It's easier to make, it's more stable as a sauce, and there's so much more you can do with it. That's it for eggs Benedict-ish, and eggs Florentine. I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Eggs en Beaujolais: This is eggs en Beaujolais by Paul Bocuse, the father of nouvelle cuisine cooking style. It's a solid example of poaching eggs in something other than water. The first thing I'll note is that the recipe is posted on foodnetwork.com and it has disclaimer that this recipe has not been tested for home use. That tells me that there's going to be some nuanced techniques that obviously chefs in high places know to do naturally but they probably glossed over when they wrote it for the website. Just keep that in mind. We start with a beurre manie, which is equal parts softened butter and all-purpose flour. Here we're doing it with two tablespoons of each. You just rub them together between your fingers until it's smooth and broken into pea sized pieces. I've also seen this technique used in a buff bourguignon and it thickens the sauce. Melting other two tablespoons of butter in a pot over medium heat and add 12 baby onions. These are actual baby onions and I don't think the recipe is referring to pearl onions, otherwise, they would have specified pearl onions. They do need to be peeled before they're cooked. Now the recipe just says cooked to color, so I'm cooking on medium heat for a few minutes on each side to get that nice browning. By the end of this, they've also softened enough that I can cut them in half with my wood spatula. Now you don't have to do that. I'm not saying you should. It's just a reference as to how well the onions are cooked. Pour in one entire bottle of Beaujolais wine and add a bouquet garni, which here is one celery stalk, one sprig of thyme, the white part of one leek, a quarter of a bay leaf, and one crush clove of garlic. Now when I buy celery, I pre-slice the entire bunch of freeze everything like this, so you don't have to slice yours, I'm just explaining why mine is sliced. It can be just one entire rib, and the same thing with the leek, it doesn't need to be sliced because we're just building aromatics here. Increase the heat to bring this to a boil, and then lower the heat to a simmer for 20 minutes uncovered. After 20 minutes, remove the onions and the bouquet garni and strain the liquid through sieve. Return the wine to the pot, and return it to a simmer over medium-low heat and add the eggs one at a time or altogether, if you've got that technique down. I strained each of them for cleaner aesthetic, although somehow I broke a couple of yokes in that process. Also this is the experience that taught me to transfer the strained eggs to a small bowl rather than dipping the strainer into the poaching liquid. They will poach for no more than four minutes in the wine. The full recipe calls for eight eggs, but you'll need to poach them four at a time in two batches if you're doing a full recipe. It suggests placing the cooked eggs on a plate and covering them with aluminum foil while the other batch cooks to keep them warm. Once the eggs are removed, add the buerre manie to the sauce and bring it all to a boil and whisk constantly. Season with salt and pepper, of course. The buerre manie will thicken the sauce and it'll give the sauce some body. It should cook in smoothly, which is why you have to whisk the whole time. Now if you want a thinner sauce, you don't have to add this to it. It doesn't do anything for flavor. You can strain the sauce in case there are any egg pieces floating around too. For your toast, we will rub a piece of raw garlic on the bread before placing the egg on top. They are a bit ugly poached in wine, and there is an aesthetic case for poaching the eggs in water instead of wine, but then they don't share that same flavor as the sauce. For me the sauce is a bit thick and I think I would skip the buerre manie next time. Maybe I also simmer the wine a little too aggressively and reduced it to much. Regardless, the flavor was fine. It really didn't blow my mind, like I was hoping it would. Maybe that was the wine that I used. But once you start reading about eggs cooked in red wines sauces, you'll learn about a couple of different dishes and how they vary from region to region in France, even when they go by the same name, including just like a city version versus a country version. With this dish, I hear that in the country versions they tend to like their sauce much thinner. Like soupy, like you eat it with the spoons is probably not as buerre manie if any at all. This just gives us all a wonderful excuse to go travel around France and trying all their different eggs in wine sauces. That's it for eggs en Beaujolais. We'll see you in the next lesson. 7. Eggs en Meurette: Ouefs en meurette, poached eggs and a bourguignon style sauce. There's a lot of steps to this, so it's something you do well in advance of whenever you want to eat it. It's a feasible sauce, so you can separate it into smaller serving sizes for later use, which justifies all the effort it takes. If you've had both bourguignon before, this will quite have the same richness, but we'll try. We need bacon cut into half inch strips or slab bacon cut into lardon. Bacon straight from the freezer is the easiest to cut. Add them to a pot over medium-high heat to render the fat and crisp up and season with black pepper. It won't need salt at this point. While that cooks, let's dice mushrooms. These are large mushrooms, so I'm cutting them in half before dicing them. Normally you'd want your vegetable pieces to be the same shape so they cook evenly. In a sauce like this, I prefer some pieces to disintegrate and only a few to hold their shape, so I'm deliberately cutting them unevenly. We also need to dice an onion, half an onion actually. I did a full one here and it was way too much onion. It was a large onion. So maybe if you want to do a full onion, just do a small one. I've got some fat in the bottom of the pan, and the bacon is currently up on the edges. They are mostly lightly brown, so I'll remove them from the pot and leaving their fat. Add the mushrooms to the pot and the fat. Stir on medium-high heat or take it down to medium if your mushroom pieces are smaller, stir them around to get them coated in the fat and then let them sit in the pan for 8-10 minutes as they brown as well. If the pan starts to look a little dry, add a little more fat in there like oil or lard or butter, and maybe about a tablespoon. The mushrooms will release their own water and we want to cook that out before we add the other vegetables. They take longer to cook than the other vegetables. While those cook down, let's dice a carrot. This is a large carrot and I didn't need all of it either. For yo, u try one medium carrot or three-fourths of a large carrot. Also, I'm not dicing it evenly because I want some of it to soften more quickly than the other pieces. After the mushrooms water has evaporated, add the onions and carrots. Again, this is a full large onion and now you can see it's too much, stir it all around to coat everything in the fat. Now before you get too far into cooking, mince three cloves of garlic and stir them in. We'll continue building flavor by letting the onions and carrots cook down for another 8-10 minutes watching the bottom of the pan for browning and not burning. This looks good to me, so I'll add the wine to deglaze the pan, an entire bottle of it. Now, don't use anything fancy because we'll cook out any of the goods stuff that makes it enjoyable to drink. But also don't use something cheap because then it's mostly sugar. The general recommendation is to use something like a California Pinot Noir to bridge that gap of affordable to cook with but not pure sugar. Bring it to a boil and reduce it by half, which will take 20-25 minutes. This here is the line where I started, so I'd say this is half. Now add two cups of a gelatinous broth. This is a thin chicken broth, which is fine, but you'd be better with a beef broth and something that's so gelatinous that it's like jelly at room temperature. If you have access to powdered gelatin, consider a teaspoon of that. Add the bacon back in and some aromatics like a bay leaf, a sprig of thyme and this is fresh dried thyme from our own garden, and salt and pepper. Bring this to a boil and reduce by a third which should be about 10 minutes. Let's continue in the theme of excessive and unnecessary and cut our bread and to pretty little forms like a perfect circle. Those edges that we're tearing off will be very helpful for tasting your sauce throughout the way. Then take a small clove of garlic and cut it in half to rub on the bread for a little extra garlic essence. Now closer to serving, you're going to toast it in the toaster for a little crisp. Now we make a buerre manie, which is a combination of flour and softened butter mashed together in a one-to-one ratio, one tablespoon of flour to one tablespoon of butter. The butter will coat the flower so it doesn't clump up when we add it to the hot liquid. This gets added to the sauce and a few nuggets at a time to thicken the sauce. Here you can see how it's already changing the color of the sauce. Add in a few nuggets, whisk it in, add a little more, whisk that in, and then simmer it for another 10 minutes until the sauce coats the back of a spoon or utensil. This is a little thinner than I wanted, but I don't want to add more fat. I'm going to try a slurry of flour whisked with water. If my stock had been more gelatinous, I don't think I'd have to add this. Now, I don't want it as thick as the beaujolais sauce, but I really wanted it thicker than this. But also I am really hungry and by tasting the sauce with those extra bread pieces, I know this tastes quite good as it is, so I'm moving on. To plate, we have our toasted bread circles, our perfectly poached eggs. These are from a vinegar soak, and now the sauce. You worked hard on this so be generous because there's always more bread. As you can see, this takes at least an hour to come together and it will get tastier the longer it sits. Now for two eggs, I estimate you could use about one-third of a cup of sauce with bread, or about the size of a muffin tin. The recipe makes about four cups each I think, so you have a lot of servings to freeze for later. I also mentioned that beef stock will be better than chicken stock because it has a deeper, richer flavor. I miss that using the chicken stock here, but I know to miss it because I will make a full boeuf bourguignon every winter and I now just freeze leftover sauce just for the eggs. While I try to mimic that flavor and texture with this recipe, it will never actually be the same because it's not cooked as long as the full dish, but the beef stock will go a pretty long way. That's it for the oeufs en meurette. Oeufs is the French plural for eggs, by the way. We'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Shakshuka: Shakshuka this is a loose guide for a cooking technique and stages of adding ingredients. With shakshuka, you have a lot of leeway in how you slice it and what else you add to the mix, like other vegetables or cheese or herbs. We start with dicing an onion, I'm making half a recipe, so I'll use half an onion here and a bell pepper. Traditionally you'd use a red bell pepper, but they give me heartburn so I'm going to go with the yellow one. For both of these, you can dice them as coarsely or as finally as you like, it just depends on the texture you want your sauce to have. I like when everything cooks down together so I make a fine dice. Add a tablespoon of oil over medium high heat, and watch for the ripples in the oil. Add bell pepper and onion and sizzle with a little salt and cook these down until they're soft and round. Now the heat is pretty high for cooking, it's medium high so keep an eye at first to make sure they aren't burning but browning in the pan is a good thing. We're building font and font builds flavor. As we stir the onions, they'll continue to pick up the brown bits and add flavor and when we add the tomatoes that will also pick up more of the brown bits and we'll have even more flavor. After a good eight minutes and only a couple of stirs, we'll add in too close of minced garlic, this is another place you can customize with lots more garlic or garlic cloves or even garlic powder if you absolutely don't have access to fresh cloves, they only need to cook for a minute or so before adding the ******. The best way to remember what ****** to use, for me at least is to start with all the ones that begin with a C, half a teaspoon each of cumin and coriander, about a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon and a pinch of cardamom and clove, and half a teaspoon of paprika. If you like heat, you should add cayenne too, and of course, salt and pepper. Stir all your ****** together and let them open up for about 30 seconds before adding the tomatoes. We'll use a 14 ounce can of whole peeled tomatoes and about a cup of water or half a can of water. I've learned that whole peeled tomatoes are better for applications like this than diced canned tomatoes, those contain ascorbic acid which helps the diced pieces maintain their shape so they won't cook down as well as the whole versions, and that's the goal here to cook down the tomatoes into the standing sauce. As body from the tomato meat and the juices cook into something thick and scoopable, we'll stab around the whole tomatoes as the simmers to break them down. Alternatively, you can use a pastry cutter to break them down in the pan or squeeze them down with your hands before adding them to the pan. You can also use fresh whole tomatoes by dicing them and throwing them straight into the pan with their juice and their skins too. We're still on medium heat now because we don't want to scorch the tomatoes, but we do want to cook them down and reduce the liquid. I gave it a quick taste and decided I wanted more cumin and more spicy so I scooped in half a teaspoon of harissa. After a few more minutes, I stirred to look at the texture. I test the consistency of the sauce by how well it can hold a divot for jag, if it fills in quickly, it's too liquidy and I let it cook longer, if it can hold the shape, then it's time for the eggs. Slide in an egg that's been cracked into a bowl so you can quickly contain the whites. I like to cover the whites with the sauce so they can cook more evenly and just leave the yolk exposed. Yes, having to clean an extra bowl is a tad annoying, but it's much better than trying to fish out pieces of eggshell from molten tomatoes if you crack it directly from the shell and to your sauce. Add a little pepper on top before we cover it and let it cook for just a few minutes. The tomato sauce super-duper hot and it's still releasing, steam and by covering the pan, you're directing the steam to cook the eggs on top and it speeds up the cooking process. After about three minutes I checked and they're still very uncooked, so the cover will go back on for another 2-3 minutes. I still have the heat on low but you can turn the heat off and let it sit. The tomato sauce holds a lot of heat and it will continue cooking the eggs even after the pot is off the stove so keep that in mind if you aren't serving it immediately, you'd want to remove the pot from the stove while there's still a little undercooked and just let the residual heat continue solidifying the whites. But once it's ready, dig in carefully. With shakshuka, you can finally chop fresh parsley to sprinkle on top or add in feta or a goat cheese while the eggs cook or drizzle a savory yogurt over at all. It really depends on what you have in your pantry. I'm using a hearty bowl bread, but fresh a pizza is the obvious choice or a fresh baguette and if you think you'll want this regularly, double or triple batch the sauce and separate it out before you add the eggs so you can freeze the sauce in your preferred serving size and then most of the work is already done the next time you want it. Then you can keep cooking what you want to eat right now in a smaller pan. Remember you have a lot of leeway with the vegetables you use, if you have any bits of leftover vegetables like zucchini or carrot or spinach, throw it in. That's what this dish is for, the main things you need are tomatoes, onions, and eggs. Maybe keeps some canned tomatoes in the pantry or free some extra sauce so you're always ready to go. That's it for shakshuka. 9. Green Shakshuka: It's green shakshuka, where we use leafy greens instead of tomatoes as the poaching bed for our beautiful eggs. Like classic shakshuka, you have plenty of options for customizing this recipe or using whatever you have on hand. Now I will say the most convenient option for this is to use a bag of frozen greens for the recipe. Although if it's the season for fresh greens, go for it. Starting with an onion. It's optional, but I do find that they give extra flavor. Maybe in this kind of recipe, use a red onion because it's got so much flavor and it is totally underrated. For this demo, I've cleaned and coarsely chopped one bunch of Swiss chard. One thing you'll have to mitigate when cooking greens is the oxalic acid. If you've ever had chard or spinach or another thin green like beet greens and you felt a weird film in your mouth, that's the oxalic acid. Too much of it can prevent your body from absorbing the calcium in the greens but using plenty of fat or seeds, creams or whatnot, can help offset that weird feeling in the mouth and it helps your body absorb what it needs. With that in mind, I used ghee as the cooking fat. Frankly, I should have used more. This is about a teaspoon of ghee and I really should have been using were like a tablespoon. Over medium heat, heat your oil or fat and add the onion. Toss it around in the fat and let it cook until it softens and begins to brown. After 3, 4, 5 minutes later, I added a couple of chopped cloves of garlic. I tossed that around for about a minute and added my spices. I used ras el hanout, which is a Moroccan spice mix that roughly translates to head of the shop or top of the shelf. Now, each spice store has its own version of the spice because it's a mixture of lots of different spices. The ratios can vary, but it usually includes at least cinnamon, cumin, coriander, all spice, black pepper and ginger. Mine has some star anise in it too, and I mostly use it in loose sediment when I bake, just for some extra depth. But for you, refer back to the shakshuka recipe for a place to start with spices; all the C's and then branch out from there. Overall, I used about a tablespoon of spice. Once you've stirred in the spices, add in the greens. Fresh greens are going to be super fluffy, but they will cook down into virtually nothing. With fresh greens, I make the effort to still scoop up the onions on the bottom and turn them to the top so the so the greens have a chance at direct heat. I still have some water on the greens from washing them but you can also add water or broth to the pan to help create some steam and cook it to all down, and we will eventually definitely do that later on in the recipe. After five minutes, this is what I've got. Browning is mostly from the onions, and the greens have lost most of their volume. Now this is where I'll add broth to the pan to help cook down the greens further and pick up that Browning to add flavor to the whole dish. How much? I don't know. Start with enough to stir around and scrape up the brown bits. This is one bunch of chards, so maybe a third of a cup here, and then add more as you decide how much water the greens have released and how far long they have to go before they're completely softened. You don't want a dry pan. That's it. You can always cook off the liquid. You just don't want a dry pan. How you cook your greens matters because thicker greens like kale collards, Brussels sprouts, they're thicker and they need more time to cook down. Thinner leaves like chard and spinach, those cooked down pretty quickly, but I cut this chard pretty coarsely so it's bigger pieces and I included the stems. If I want this all softened, I need to cook it down some more. I added another third of a cup of broth so I could basically braise it all. You also have the option of partially blending or finely chopping the greens into something more like a saag paneer consistency, and you'll still need to monitor how much liquid to use to keep that from overcooking into some burnt, unappetizing thick paste. For my toppings, I'm doing spiced yogurt and the Tahini sauce. While that braces, I'll grate a small garlic clove into a paste over half a cup of yogurt and about a tablespoon of lemon juice, and about a quarter to half a teaspoon of cumin and a little pinch of salt, stir it together, and then taste it, then add more of something until you like it. I added more cumin. This is a Greek yogurt and I want to make it drizzlable, so I need to add water. You can do this or use regular unrestrained yogurt that's a little thinner. I added a little water at a time until I could drizzle it. It's been 5-8 minutes simmering the greens and broth. My greens are soft and I still have a little broth at the bottom, which is good. This is where we want to be because we don't want our eggs to sit in a dry pan. I'll add the eggs now. By the way, you can have two to three eggs in the bowl at the same time. Those tight whites right around the yolk won't mix in with the other eggs and they'll naturally stay separated. Once they're in place, cover and steam on low heat for 2 minutes. This was at 3 minutes, my first time around and they're firmer than I want. I did later on test with 2 minutes and another egg and the remainder greens and it was just right. Keep the heat low and slow and gently, for creamier or egg whites and molten yolks. To top it all, I'll drizzle on my yogurt sauce and some Tahini sauce I had laying around and dig in with some bread. This is another place to add feta or goat cheese or cream or cream fresh. Anything creamy and tart will pair really well with the greens. Remember, you have lots of choices about the types of green you use, and the thickness of those leaves will determine how long they cook for and even how you chop them for cooking. Again, the most convenient method would be to use frozen spinach. That is it for green shakshuka. We will see you in the next lesson. 10. Eggs in Purgatory: Eggs in purgatory. While it's quite similar to shakshuka, its roots are in Southern Italy versus North Africa. But with them being so close geographically, they will share a lot of similarities. This demo, we'll use fresh tomatoes instead of canned ones, so you can see how that process goes. The recipes I consulted used extras like chopped anchovies or pancetta, which definitely gives an Italian flavor. If you're using them, cook them with the garlic for just a minute, before adding the tomatoes. For canned tomatoes, you need a 14-ounce can. In shakshuka, it can be whole or diced. I used 20 ounces of fresh tomatoes, both chopped Roma, and a few whole cherry tomatoes. I'm slicing three cloves of garlic, but you can use as little as one glove. You can mince it, or grade it, we really don't need to be too fussy here. Heat about one tablespoon of oil in the skillet, no bigger than an eight-inch skillet, over medium heat. Also, I'm using a well seasoned cast iron pan here. Generally, you want to avoid tomatoes and cast iron since the acid in the tomatoes could damage the iron, and it makes your food taste a little funny. But if you're confident in your seasoning, the seasoned coating of the pan, that should protect the pan. Apparently, I'm pretty confident here. Then add in the tomatoes and sprinkle in a healthy pinch of salt and pepper, and stir it all up. For the purgatory part of the recipe, we'll add some heat, like a quarter teaspoon of dried chili flakes, or half a teaspoon of the solid bits from some chili oil, just enough to make you suffer from the heat like in purgatory. After a few minutes, my tomato chunks are falling apart, which is what I want, except for those cherry tomatoes haven't burst yet, so I'll help them along with a careful little pierce. Additionally, I'll lower the heat, and cover the pan, so the cherry tomatoes can get a little more oozy. We want a lot of liquids, so you could add some water to the pan too. A reminder, if you're using canned tomatoes, you won't have to deal with all these extra steps. Essentially, when your tomato mixture gets to the thick, saucy consistency, you'll add in your eggs. Make a little divot in the tomato sauce, so the egg knows where to sit. Another feature of eggs in purgatory is the addition of Parmesan cheese, sprinkle as much or as little shredded Parmesan that you'd like just over the whites of the eggs. Cover the pan again to help steam the top of the eggs for just three minutes, maybe two-and-a-half. Serve this with a slice of toasted bread, so you can sup up all that delicious spicy tomato sauce. If you happen to have a lemon lying around, rub it on the bread for a little lemon essence, it's delicious, and a beautiful detail for any recipe, but especially here. Sprinkle on more cheese or extra spice. All in all, this should take about 30 minutes max, and it's another one that comes together with very few ingredients. That's it for eggs in purgatory, we'll see you in the next lesson. 11. Eggs All'Amatriciana: Eggs All'Amatriciana, another Italian tomato-based dish based on a pasta sauce. Out of the tomato-based dishes, this is my favorite. Also, this video demonstrates using can diced tomatoes instead of fresh or whole canned tomatoes, like in the other tomato base dishes in this class. We start by slicing four ounces of bacon into half-inch strips, which will be four strips of regular bacon. Pancetta or guanciale is ideal, but regular bacon works quite well too. Start cooking it over medium-high heat in a skillet while we prep the other ingredients. The pasta sauce version doesn't usually include onions, but some of the egg versions do. I like onions, specifically red onions. I'm dicing a full medium-sized red onion while keeping a close watch on the bacon and stirring it occasionally. By the time I'm finished with the onions, the bacon has cooked out some of the fat, and I'll add the onions to the pan, give it a good stir to coat the onions in that bacon flavor, and let the onion softened about 5-8 minutes by that time, you'll have even more brown bits collected in the pan. We'll use a quarter cup of red wine. I'm sure white wine is fine as well, to deglaze the pan. Not every recipe uses wine, so you could use water with a little bit of lemon juice or a bone broth of your choice. Look how easily this picks up those brown bits though. That'll cook down pretty quickly because it's such a small amount and you can move right into adding the tomatoes. However, I had extra broth sitting around from another recipe, about half a cup. I added that you may need anywhere between a quarter to half a cup of extra liquid to thin out the tomatoes anyway as you simmer it, and that can be water or broth. Now I took a minute to simmer that down, still on medium-high heat and I see in the sauce with black pepper. I don't add much salt when I cook with bacon because it generally carries enough salt for the dish. For this serving size, we need 14 ounces of tomatoes, 28 ounce cans, however, can save a little bit of money, and if you're only using half, you can freeze the other half of the Canvas, something else down the road and now it's just a little more convenient. Or just double the rest of this recipe to use it all and then just have extra delicious sauce for more eggs or even just a pasta sauce. Also of interest. This is a can of diced tomatoes, which I've talked about why you'd want to use whole tomatoes over something like this, but sometimes you have no choice. At least you get to see the cooking difference. I've reduced the heat to a medium-low at this point. Now once I have stirred it in with the broth and everything else, and it simmers for a few minutes you'll start testing the consistency of the sauce to add the eggs. Like the other tomato sauces, we want it thick enough to hold the egg, but thin enough that it doesn't burn through the final cooking stage. Right before I added the eggs, I lowered the heat as low as I could. I've cracked two eggs into a room akin to expedite this process. Once they're in the sauce, you can try to cover the whites with the sauce. In theory, this should help the whites cook quicker. Ideally, we want the eggs already opened and ready to go so they get added at roughly the same time so they cook evenly. Last, we'll do the best we can, and once they're all added, we'll add some cheese. Your best parmesan or pecorino graded or shredded as much or as little as you want. I'm covering the egg whites with the cheese before I cover the pan and let it cook on super-low heat. I wanted to keep an eye on those whites. On drastically low heat, I let them sit for 10 minutes and checked every three-ish minutes. This top one is a little firm. It's overcooked. It was the first one in and this area is the hottest part of my cooktop. Everything up there always overcooks. Now the second one is a little better, not a runny yolk, but not a fully cooked. The whites are still soft, which is good. The bottom one is soft everywhere, also good. The one on the left has a firm yolk but a soft white oddly, I'm still acclimating to my cooktop with this type of dish and exactly what works for me and you will have this experience too. The best thing for you to do is to take notes, write down what you do and how it turned out so the next time you try, you know what to do differently. Like for me, I should put the egg up top in last since it cooks quicker. That is it for Eggs All'Amatriciana I will see you in the next lesson. 12. Eggs en Cocotte: Eggs en cocotte, it's poached eggs that technically not because poached eggs are supposed to be directly in the cooking liquid. Since these are cooked in a vessel, this being a ramekin set in the cooking water, it's technically its own category. But for the purposes of this whole class and the series, I'm classifying it as poached esque, because the end result should be the same as a poached egg just in a dish instead of floating around in the cooking liquid. The standard en cocotte is slightly larger than a ramekin, you could fit two eggs in it. The traditional recipe is mostly cream and cheese and sometimes it's baked. But this is a specialty item and I don't expect a lot of people to have this, so I'm using remekins. Firing up the oven for just a few eggs seems like a lot of energy to use, so I'm demoing a stovetop method. First, the fun part, making your flavor combinations. Pull out every condiment and sauce you have or can think of, and start creating concoctions. You can make many versions of any of the other dishes we've covered in the class or use leftover pasta sauce or curry's leftover vegetables, add cheese, meat, ******. This is really fun to play around with. I'm going to demo a few options to give you some inspiration. Every ramekin needs to be oiled with olive oil, butter, sesame oil, ghee, lard, schmaltz, it needs something. For my first combo, I'm using olive oil and leftover yogurt that's spiced with cumin and garlic. I'm covering the bottom of the ramekin with the yogurt, adding the egg and adding more yogurt on top and garnishing with a few capers or more than a few capers and grated bottarga which is salted cured fish roe. The next one gets olive oil, mozzarella cheese, leftover sauteed mushrooms, egg, more mushrooms, and more mozzarella. My third combo starts with sesame oil, then a loose mixture of gochujang, soy sauce, and a tad more sesame oil, which really should have been toasted sesame oil and other drizzle of sesame oil. The fourth combo starts with bacon fat, then leftover mushrooms, half a slice of deli ham torn into bits and scattered around then the egg. I'm trying something new here, since we always struggle with cooking the whites long enough, but then overcooking the yolks. I'm just adding the egg whites and I'll add the yolks later in the cooking process. Then a little more ham and some parmesan cheese. My fifth combo is lard, again, because it's already on the pastry brush, and then leftover caramelized onions from a pasta dish. I'm doing the separated egg white thing again. Hopefully, by now your imagination is going crazy with the combinations you can come up with for this, for the cooking technique we'll bring about half an inch of water to a light simmer. You'll need a pot or pan with straight sides since we'll cover it and you'll want enough clearance over the ramekins to keep the steam contained in the lid. I always place a ramekin in the pan while pouring the water to make sure I don't overfill it. The water levels will rise as more ramekins get added, and it shouldn't go higher than halfway up the ramekin. Bring the water to the same heat level as with any other poached egg, where you see steam and you have little bubbles breaking to the top. We'll cover the pot and let the water cook from below and the steam cook from the top. You will actually probably hear your ramekins chattering in the pan. If you do separate the yolk from the white, add it in after just 2-3 minutes, and add more toppings if you want and recover. This was pretty low heat and it took nine minutes before I felt like the whites were cooked enough. But depending on your heat level and what's going on in your setup, check every two minutes and just like with everything else, stop when it looks almost done but not quite. This is where I decided to stop. I'm really glad I did, It was perfect. Once one egg was firm, I knew that all of them would be right behind it. Remember, they'll keep cooking just a little bit more even after you remove them from the pot. You'll need tongs or oven mitts to help get them out of the water. They will be very hot. The tongs were scary for me because it's not a solid grip, so I just use oven mitts. The goal is the same, cooked whites and molten yolk. Let's see how we did. Digging into the yogurt and caper combo. It is perfect, creamy whites and molten yolks. To eat, you can dip bread into it or spoon it out and spread it on the bread. Now my gochujang overcooked. it was at the top of the pan which always gets more heat than other parts of the cooktop. Next, the mushrooms and mozzarella. This one was watery and I can't tell if it's an uncooked egg white or just extra water from the lid or the cheese. I'm pretty sure it's water and not egg whites simply because all the others were cooked through. Although there is a possibility that the cheese was somehow thick enough to insulate the egg from cooking. I guess keep that in mind that if you do want to use a cheese like a finer shredded cheese probably better for this. Next, in the corner, the caramelized onion and parmesan combo. This is absolutely perfect. This is one where I added the yolk a couple of minutes into the cooking process. If you're comfortable with that, the whole process of separating the yolk from the whites and then remembering to add the yolks, I say it's a winner and yes, try this with all of the thicker sauce recipes too. Of course, the ham and mushroom also ends up being perfect because it too had its yolk added later. Now, assuming you don't have to cook anything to add to the ramekins, this comes together really quickly. Since you can use just a little bit of a lot of things, you can cook a lot of variety at one time. You can technically cook this in the oven too. It's really better for much larger servings. You still cook in water bath, so you'd fill a roasting pan with boiling water. You have to pre-boil water and fill it halfway up the ramekins, and then roast at 375 degrees for about 10-12 minutes. If you do that, I recommend carefully adding the yolks a few minutes into the cooking process because in the oven it's much harder to pull it out and test and see. But again, this seems too fuzzy for a small serving if you have a large enough pan or pot. I cannot wait to see what you guys come up with, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 13. Closing & Thank You!: [MUSIC] We've cooked a lot of eggs and covered a wide variety of techniques. The question is, do you know yet which one you'll try first if you haven't already? Now, I expect to continue to uncover more dishes that utilize poached eggs, so I'll continue updating the class. So far my favorites are eggs all'Amatriciana, and oeufs en meurette. I had a delight discovering that I can marinate raw eggs in a vinegar and water mixture to set the whites for a perfectly poached egg. After testing all of these recipes, I have finally concluded that I cannot rely on my memory to cook a perfect egg. A timer is absolutely necessary and always saves the day. I'm around and active in the class. Share what you've learned, ask for clarification or other questions. I appreciate you being here so much. Engagement with the class is super important for us instructors, so leaving a comment or asking a question allows me to meaningfully engage with you on your learning process. This isn't all you're going to get from me. I have several other courses in the works for all of the other ways you can cook an egg, and I'll even go into chicken recipes in a whole separate series. If you enjoy my approach, you can find me at Cooking Companion TV on YouTube, and JennaGEdwardsTV on both Instagram and TikTok. Thank you again, and I'll see you in another class. [MUSIC]